By the late 1800s Leland was home to a small fleet of fishing vessels. These early fishermen set their nets offshore in open wood mackinaw boats rigged with sails. By 1905 the fishermen began to replace the sails in their mackinaw boats with gas-powered engines. The new engines and the addition of protective cabins enabled the fishermen to fish farther from port, in more inclement weather, and for more of the year.
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Diesel eventually replaced gas and new machinery was added to newly built tugs that made the fishermen increasingly efficient at catching fish, but wood tugs still reigned in Fishtown until the late 1950s. In 1958 the Steffens and Stallman families dedicated two new fish tugs in Leland. With these boats, the Janice Sue and the Mary Ann, commercial fishing in Leland left the world of wood boats and entered the world of steel, with hulls specially designed for the rigors of this part of the Great Lakes. Janice Sue has served in Leland ever since. Trap net fishing began in Leland in 1982, with the launch of the hand-crafted steel tug, the Joy.
It’s funny how certain places weave in and out of your life—ebb and flow—only to anchor themselves more deeply than we ever expected. My first memories of Fishtown aren’t sharp images so much as feelings. Nostalgia seems to work that way—sometimes the emotions come back stronger than the details. When I was growing up, my […]
When you show someone Fishtown for the very first time, where do you begin? At the end of October, two local TV reporters came to report on Fishtown. Visit to Fishtown and Leland are almost rite of passage for reporters new to this region, and for both it would be their first visits. By this […]
I first actually saw Fishtown on a gray winter’s day in 2007. I wanted to walk the snowy docks and take in the Fishtown landscape before a meeting, because that meeting was with the board of the Fishtown Preservation Society, which had just completed the purchase of Fishtown from the Carlson family. It was February […]
